


severed from a former light

by strifescloud



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Angst, M/M, hand-holding, ocelot and the AI pod
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 07:43:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5959261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strifescloud/pseuds/strifescloud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“She was my mother.”</p>
<p>Kaz doesn’t understand at first, turning his head to steal a fragment of comprehension from Ocelot’s face. His expression has sharpened in the shattered silence and Kaz follows his gaze as it stretches across the platform, landing contemplatively on the AI pod.</p>
            </blockquote>





	severed from a former light

**Author's Note:**

> as a fair warning i wrote this in a very weird brain space while listening to say anything's weird and wonderful new album so it, by extension, might come across as a little weird  
> im branching out im finally not writing legit bosselhira. scary stuff

The call comes in mid-morning.

It starts as a hurried whisper, Snake quickly outlining everything he can see. The intel was wrong – the guards – there’s a _tank_ – until he’s cut off with nothing more than a muffled curse and the sound of gunfire.

Kaz watches as Ocelot’s face shifts through a multitude of emotions before he settles on anger. He turns on his intel team, nearly vibrating with tension, snarling at them to find out everything they can. Kaz is already on the line to the support team, but he keeps an eye on Ocelot as he talks, watching as he stalks over to his desk to re-read his files, to find what he missed.

To admit fear into your heart is to accept an early defeat, but as Kaz listens to the sharp bursts of gunfire he wonders for a terrible moment if Snake will be coming home in a body bag.

Ocelot hangs on every word Pequod speaks as he attempts to exfiltrate Snake. His intensity is vicious in its sharp focus, and Kaz knows that he wonders the same thing.

Snake makes it onto the helicopter and Kaz exhales his anxiety into the cold air. But Snake is injured, he knows, and imagination wraps its clawed hands around him, his mind’s eye flooded with blood and metal as they join the waiting medical team at the landing platform.

Ocelot murmurs something in Russian as Snake is pulled off the helicopter onto a gurney, conscious but only just and Kaz can taste the metallic tang of blood in the air. He keeps a cautious eye on Ocelot, watching as the heavy weight of failure slinks through his face to rest on his shoulders, but cannot lend his thoughts a voice before Ocelot stalks away. A member of the medical team grabs his arm, and he resolves to find Ocelot later. Snake needs him now.

* * *

 When all is settled, he finds Ocelot staring blankly at the AI pod.

He would accuse him of hiding if his presence wasn’t so blatant, his legs stretched out in front of him as he lights a cigarette, grey smoke curling through the air. Ocelot has never before shown the slightest spark of interest in the AI pod beyond its morbid contents, and Kaz wonders what has brought him here.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Only sometimes.”

Kaz carefully plucks meaning from between blurred lines – ‘sometimes’ is stress and strain sapping strength, respite granted by every poisonous inhalation.

He doesn’t speak the words that have curled in his mind, reassurances and realisations in the wake of perceived failure. It is a fragile thing they have between them, likely to shatter like cracked glass under the pressure of his fumbling words.

He lets the silence stretch between them, long enough to border on uncomfortable before he speaks again, words clawing with bleeding hands across the walled divide Ocelot has built in smoke and stillness.

“Mind if I join you?”

The hand that is waved in his direction grants indifferent permission and Kaz carefully lowers himself to join Ocelot against the wall, crutch clattering on the cold metal as he sits. To push now would be to break, so he waits in the quiet for Ocelot to speak.

“She was my mother.”

Kaz doesn’t understand at first, turning his head to steal a fragment of comprehension from Ocelot’s face. His expression has sharpened in the shattered silence and Kaz follows his gaze as it stretches across the platform, landing contemplatively on the AI pod.

Oh, he thinks, and then _oh_ , because he never knew.

“She was my mother,” he repeats, echoes of old anger creeping into his words, “but I didn’t know then. I didn’t know _her_.”

Kaz shuffles closer, their arms almost touching but not quite, hoping his presence is enough to hold these old wounds closed despite knowing that it can’t be enough, not when the rust-red has already bled onto Ocelot’s words like poison. Ocelot tilts his head slowly in Kaz’s direction, wordless thanks expressed in the slight twitch of his lips.

“Did Snake ever tell you the story?”

“He told me enough.” Enough for Kaz to stitch the words Snake had left unsaid with the words that had poured out of the AI pod all those years ago, a painful patchwork buried deep and best left forgotten. Ocelot releases a weary laugh into the star-scarred sky.

“I met her, then. In Tselinoyarsk. We were supposedly working for the same side, but we’d our own parts to play. Both of our real selves were hidden behind so many layers. I met her,” Kaz hears the anger and hurt crawl back into his voice, “but she didn’t know me, and I _didn’t know her_.”

_Oh, but you did,_ Kaz thinks, sorrowful in his sympathy, _enough that it burns to think of it_.

Kaz doesn’t know much about parenting, but he knows something of devotion, and a mother’s devotion to her child can burn as bright as a falling star.

“I never met her,” he begins slowly, aware that he holds the fragile glass of their relationship in the cradle of his clumsy words “but I think she would have known.”

“All the worse,” Ocelot shoots back with a bitter twist of a smile, “because then I’ll have failed her.”

“Mistakes aren’t always failings.”

“Snake told me that in her final moments, she told him something - that having personal feelings for your comrades is one of the worst sins you can commit.”

He takes a long drag of his cigarette, exhaling the smoke with a sigh.

“So not only did I fail to protect her most beloved student, but I have failed her ideology, her beliefs. And I thought that if I could only protect him, that it wouldn’t matter.”

Kaz cannot resist closing the final gap between them, leaning gently against Ocelot, trying to give physical weight to the words that clamour to escape him.

“Snake will be fine. You haven’t failed her.” He tries to give the words the presence of doctrine, to erase the lingering shadows of doubt in Ocelot’s downcast eyes.

“He could have died.” Ocelot’s voice is a sharp crack of anger as he looks away, trying to draw calm from the long shadows around them. His tone is even again when he speaks, but it is a fragile façade. “He could have died, and it would’ve been my fault.”

Kaz can tell that Ocelot is barely holding his bleeding heart together with frail fingertips but he reaches out to take his hand anyway, tightening his grip until it borders on the kind of pain they can begin to share.

Ocelot turns his head back to the AI pod, the artificial lights shining on his face and the sight of it, beautiful and sad and beautifully sad, makes Kaz’s heart stutter in its cage of brittle bones.

A thousand adoring confessions well up in his chest but he swallows them down because now is _not_ the time. He feels them lodge themselves in the empty space between his two lungs as Ocelot takes a ragged breath, saving the words for a moment when he can let each one fall from his lips with a gravity that befits their heavy meaning.

There was a time, he maybe remembers, when he thought that Snake was the only one he could love.

There was a time, he knows, when Ocelot decided that Snake wasn’t the only one deserving of his love.

The two hands of the clock tick over into one. Kaz feels his grip tighten on the glass.

“What we do is dangerous. Snake knows that as well as anyone. He won’t blame you for one instance of bad intel.”

Ocelot takes one breath, then another. He puts out his cigarette.

“She wouldn’t blame you.”

The AI pod has remained blessedly silent and though Kaz wishes fervently that it had never come to be their possession, he’s grateful in that moment. If it had anything to say to Ocelot, it was best left for another time.

“I don’t claim to know her,” he continues, voice laden with conviction, “but I think she would have been proud of you.”

He brings the other hand up, brushing his lips against the knuckles before he lets their interlocked fingers fall to his lap. Ocelot turns to finally face him, the smallest beginnings of a smile on his lips, and Kaz feels victorious at last.

“Thank you, Kaz.”

The shadows that had left a barrier between them have been banished, at least for the moment. Kaz lets his head lean against Ocelot’s shoulder. He feels Ocelot’s cheek rest against his hair, and then they both are still.

They sit in silence until the sun rises.

**Author's Note:**

> my god i am pretentious
> 
> i think that ocelot, with his sneaky information ways, would have found out abt the boss before the events of MGSV sometime. i was watching the videos of all the things it says to venom when you come around and shoot at it and stuff and i wondered how he would have felt having some echo of his mother just hanging around on the base (especially given that he wasn't around for peacewalker)
> 
> for real though, say anything beyonce'd us with a new album this week, i seriously recommend going and listening to it, its very mental health/Brain stuff in a good way. title from their song "Goshua" from that album
> 
> shoutout to twitter/tumblr user heruhousu for helping me proofread this mess and making it seem a bit less like i burned a thesaurus and snorted the ashes off a table  
> as always, im available at strifescloud.tumblr.com for some mad metal gear chats


End file.
